Proposed Government Amendment Hints at Strange Effects from UFOs
A historic amendment could establish a United States government office to study UFOs — a major development signifying the government may be ready to treat the UFO phenomenon seriously. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has quietly introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022 that, if passed, would radically transform the US government’s treatment of UFOs.
Nick Pope, who worked for the UK’s Ministry of Defense investigating UFOs, said, “The main takeaways, obviously, are to replace the existing UAP taskforce with an Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office to loop in almost every part of the military and the intelligence community. And in terms of accountability, to have this independent watchdog, the Aerial and Transmedium Phenomena Advisory Committee sitting over a lot of this, selecting people from the Galileo Project, from the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, and bodies like that — it’s unprecedented.”
A significant development in this amendment is the inclusion of civilian scientific experts, specifically mentioning professor Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project. But the US government has had a bumpy history with civilian scientists.
“What it’s trying to do is blend together the government side of this with the scientific and academic community side, and I think for many, many years there has been a disconnect,” Pope said. “Government doesn’t do science very well. Here in the language of Sen. Gillibrand’s amendment, we have an attempt to fix that, to try and bring in scientists and academics, and loop in their expertise so that it can be properly leveraged.”
In June of 2021, the unclassified, short version of the UAP report left many wanting more. This amendment calls for unclassified reports. How do they rectify the government’s need for secrecy with the public’s desire for accountability?
“There’s always this tension between the classified and the unclassified. Clearly, we have a nine-page, unclassified summary, but by all accounts, there’s a classified version at least double that,” Pope said. “So, Sen. Gillibrand’s amendment acknowledges that there will always be a classified side, but also addresses that important point about public accountability by saying there must continue to be reports. There’s a whole raft of reports required, I think some annual, some quarterly.”
Since the 1940s and the United States’ first detonation of nuclear weapons, there have been reports of UFOs visiting and even interfering with nuclear weapons. This amendment includes language requiring reports on “[U]nidentfied aerial phenomena associated with military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships and submarines,” as well as any health problems associated with close contact with UAPs.
“Immense significance of the material about human effects, the physiological effects of close encounters. If a pilot has a close encounter and comes back and finds that his watch is telling a different time, or if he comes back and finds he’s got sunburn and somebody says, ‘[H]ey, it’s not sunburn, it’s radiation.’ Those statements which you can see reflected in the language in the Gillibrand amendment, what they do is acknowledge the reality of this part of the phenomenon. If you read between the lines of it, what it’s essentially saying is ‘these things are happening,’ that’s the given. And what they’re then saying is, ‘given that these things are happening — UAP interaction with nuclear weapons, close encounters that have physiological effects — we need to find out the what’s and the why’s a little bit more.’ So, it’s extraordinary by its implication of the reality of this,” Pope said.
Nick Pope started with the UK Ministry of Defense studying the UFO phenomenon in the summer of 1991, 30 years later, what can we learn about how far we’ve come?
“The big picture is that we have transitioned within government from a policy of deny, debunk, and downplay, to a position where essentially, this is real, now we need to find out what the heck’s going on and what our response to it should be. With my perspective of 30 years of involvement in this topic, yeah, I think we are moving to a very good place here,” Pope said.
The Gillibrand amendment could be taken up by Congress as early as this month.
The 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO Incident, Explained
The Great 1952 Washington, D.C., UFO Incident
It was around 11:40 p.m. on Saturday night, July 19, 1952. Air traffic controller Edward Nugent was at his radar screen at Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C., when he saw seven unusual blips on the screen. No known aircraft were in the area and there was no explanation for the presence of the objects. Nugent called his superior, Harry Barnes, to come and look. Together, they watched the mysterious objects dart across the sky. They even checked to make sure the radar was working properly.
Nugent and his boss checked with the control tower and learned that both controllers in the tower had also seen the blips. They called nearby Andrews Air Force Base, where controllers also saw strange objects on their radar screens.
Two of the objects clearly hovered over the White House, with another one over the Capitol. Controllers at both airports began tracking the objects, which they estimated to be traveling at about 130 mph when they suddenly disappeared from the radar screen. Then appeared again, zipping all around the sky. One made a 90-degree turn and another one suddenly went in reverse, both maneuvers that American airplanes could not make at the time.
An airline captain, S.C. Pierman, was waiting on the tarmac in the cockpit of his DC-4 at National Airport for authorization to take off. While waiting, he saw six objects moving about the sky. Over a 14-minute time period, Pierman would see the objects and then they would disappear, reappearing moments later. He was talking to controller Barnes this entire time. Every time Pierman reported a sighting, a blip appeared on Barnes’s radar screen. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 20, the objects disappeared entirely.
Were these really unidentified flying objects (UFOs)? Did they come back again on another day for a second look? What was the significance of the 1952 UFO sightings and how did the sightings become known as the Great UFO Flap of 1952?
The Objects Return on July 26, 1952
At around 8:15 p.m. one week later, a stewardess and a captain were on an inbound flight into Washington National Airport. They observed strange lights above their plane. At the same time, an officer at Andrews Air Force Base also observed the objects. Other pilots in the air at the time saw them, too. Similar to the occurrence from the week before, the “encore performance” of the UFOs ended around dawn on Sunday morning. The objects disappeared from sight and off of the airport radar.
